Jon Holmes's short stature is a running joke among his fellow presenters on Radio 4's The Now Show. Alas, he proves himself comedy small fry on the fringe with this disappointing hour of readings and chat, derived from his 2007 compendium of rock anecdotes, Status Quo and the Kangaroo, and his most recent book, Rock Star Babylon. The targets are soft, the spirit is a little mean, and Holmes's punchlines hit the ground with a nastier thud than a TV tumbling from a hotel room window.

The backbone is provided by excerpts from Holmes's most recent book, also known (as per the title of this event) as Rock Star Babylon. The standard varies. The tale of the kangaroo that bounced off with Status Quo's van keys is amusing. But Bon Jovi's spat with fellow rockers Skid Row is a non-story, told only to justify five minutes of limp material culminating in a not-so-hilarious Photoshop image of Holmes bumming Jon Bon Jovi. There's grisly pleasure to be had when Faith No More's frontman defecates in a hotel hairdryer – but it drains away as Holmes, rather than leave the consequences to our imagination, makes them gratuitously explicit.The show's liveliest sequence comes when Holmes invites the audience to devise its own salacious rock-star rumour, and then updates the relevant Wikipedia page (Mick Hucknall's, in this instance) accordingly. There are also wry interventions by Stephen Fry, whose poised and characterful contributions (he provides audio footnotes) throws Holmes's effortful delivery into cruel relief. But the show is dragged down by poor jokes and gracelessness. Sting's pretentious autobiography is the comedy equivalent of an open goal, which Holmes misses by applying to it only scorn, unleavened by wit.(The contrast with Stewart Lee, whose recent set deftly skewered memoirs by Davina McCall and Chris Moyles, is painful.) Elsewhere, the gags are audaciously lazy: when a case of mistaken identity leads Bob Dylan to meet a humble English plumber, Holmes says he'll be glad of it "if he ever needs his ballcock a-changing". Like his hero Jon Bon Jovi, Holmes is livin' on a prayer here – but the comedy gods aren't listening.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 25 August 2009. The review above originally appeared with three stars; it was meant to have two.